OK, this episode was bizarre. And not in a shocking-Lost-is-crazy type way.

The show finally focused on Nikki and Paolo, the two characters who have had one line per episode for much of this season. Who were they? This tells us.

Nikki is an actress, who was in Sydney filming a spot on a show called Exposé. (Just like this episode is an exposé of sorts!). In her spot on that show, she dies–and after, comments to Exposé’s producer that she’s a guest star, and she knows guest stars usually die. Ha! How self-referential! Then some stuff where she and Paolo con that producer out of 8 million dollars worth of diamonds. Then the plane crashes on The Island, and the two of them spend most of the time since episode one behind the scenes, trying to find the diamonds. This is odd because as Sun says at the end, the diamonds are worthless on The Island. Also weirdly, Nikki and Paolo happen on a few things before the other survivors–the Nigerian plane, The First Hatch, etc. This show in a way was reliving the whole series. I’m not clear what the point was. (Though there was some interesting info revealed here and there.) Anyway, Nikki and Paolo end up dying, like the guest stars they are.

I just looked on Wiki, and that claims that Nikki’s character (and I assume Paolo’s too) was written off the show because of the fan response to her character. The producer of Lost is even quoted there, saying that these characters were “universally despised.” This is odd to me, because they hadn’t even really been in it until this episode! I did find it quite odd that there were suddenly two characters hanging about. I figured they were part of The Others, but I guess not. What exactly were fans so angrily responding to? Just the unnecessary introduction of two good-looking new characters?

UPDATE: I just did some looking–here was the explanation given by one of the writers: “People hated them before they even opened their mouths to say anything significant because it felt like they were crashing the party.” But there’s always new characters popping up! Are Lost fans that fickle?

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